When working through main contractors, a lot of the projects’ floor finishes are fully specified prior to engaging with the main contractor and actually starting on site. But even in these situations, flooring contractors still have influence with regard to other items such as floor protection, DPMs, latex smoothing compounds and the adhesives used, so they can opt for low VOC products.

Westcotes also targets a significant amount of end-user work, in which the company can specify what flooring it fits, and has the option, for example, to go for loose lay fast fit systems, reducing the need for adhesives – making the products easier to uplift and easier to recycle. “We do a lot of work directly for schools and the education sector in general,” says Carl Harper, Managing Director, Westcotes Flooring Company. “A lot of schools nowadays can make their own choices about these things, so that means we can get involved with the specification, assisting and guiding the school where necessary. For them it is often more about colour and aesthetics than anything else, to match the walls and the rest of the teaching environment. They’ll often leave it to us as the professionals to specify the exact products that are going to be used.”

Whatever the type of contract, the contractor can generally choose the type of floor protection used. Westcotes mainly use Protec RE Board for the day-to-day temporary floor protection for their jobs, which is made from 60% post-consumer waste, and it is then recycled again after use. They are also involved with various take back schemes such as Recofloor, Forbo’s takeback scheme, F Ball’s recycling scheme and Protec’s closed loop recycling scheme. “For example on a job that we are on at the moment, we are using Polyflor vinyl, so we are using Recofloor, founded by Polyflor and Altro,” says Carl Harper. “We have big lockable bins on site to take back all our Polyflor offcuts. We also participate in the F Ball recycling scheme, so all the F Ball buckets go into that bin. We are also utilising the Protec closed loop recycling scheme, they take away the floor protection at the end of the job for recycling. So all those three elements are being diverted away from landfill.

“The majority of contaminated material still does go to landfill, and I believe the main contractors need to be more committed to getting this material recycled. What we also need is further advances in technology to enable this to be properly separated. There are processes being developed to do this, but there is more work to do. The main contractors have to play a bigger part in making improvements, especially with regard to segregation of waste, whether its cardboard, timber or plastic.

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